Per the book “Alcatraz Escape Files” by the Golden Gate National Parks Conservatory, fourteen attempts were made to escape the prison with none being successful.

Several attempts happened when prisoners were working on the island but outside of the prison building. Cell bars were not a barrier, but they fell when climbing over fences and then either shot dead by guards or recaptured because their wounds prevented them from swimming the bay. A few took sometimes months to cut through the bars of their cells, then get out and use a tool to spread the bars of a window to get outside while evading the guards patrolling their cell blocks, only to be spotted going towards the water by guards posted in towers above and shot or just recaptured. Others got to the water but gave up before swimming away because it was just too cold. I read that the water was as cold as 46 degrees. Ugh!

The most famous escape included four men who spent seven months of planning. They stole spoons from the mess hall to chip away the wall around the air vents at the back of their cells. They created fake heads from soap, plaster, and other stolen materials plus topping them with real hair from the barbershop. They made rafts out of stolen rain coats and filled them with air from an accordion used as a bellows. The night of the escape, they placed the fake heads in bed to fool the guards doing the nightly head count, removed the grill from the air vents, climbed through the hole and up the pipes behind their cells to the roof where they climbed through a ventilator cap that was mistakenly left open. They got away before the guards discovered the heads were fake. The men were never found after extensive searching and were presumed drowned. Only two men from another attempt were ever able to swim away from the island, but one was found on a rock near by. The other made it to the Golden Gate Bridge before being captured.

I mention these attempts to show how hard and desperately these men worked to escape only to fail in the end. Even if the men made it to land instead of drowning, where would they go? They probably would have been found eventually. And what about the men who got out after serving their time? If they really had wanted to leave their lives of crime, were they able to? They would have found it difficult to find a job. They would always be known as ex-cons. Their crimes would have been like an albatross, or a ball and chain, around their necks. No one probably trusted them enough to higher them. Alcatraz was closed as a penitentiary in 1963 due to the expense of shipping in supplies and maintaining the buildings because of weakened walls from the erosion of salt water. It was also to move the inmates to places where they could receive rehabilitation instead of just punishment. But these other penitentiaries couldn’t have helped much to make the convicts go straight after leaving, even if they had rehab programs. Time has shown this to be true.

All of us deserve punishment for the wrong things we have done. All of us are imprisoned in some form by mistakes we have made. And we try to escape in our own strength but fail. Jesus, the Son of God, handles our punishment and attempts to escape captivity differently. Most importantly, Jesus took the punishment for all of our wrong doing or sin, really for being the boss of our own lives, when he died on the cross. The punishment for sin is death (Romans 6:23), or separation from God, and without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sin (Hebrews 9:22). So Jesus is our Savior. Jesus is also to be the Lord of our lives. He can be trusted to rule over us because He showed His love by dying in our place when He had done nothing wrong. If we accept Him by faith as our Lord and Savior, we are forgiven, and we enter into a personal relationship with God. All our sins are forgotten. We are saints who have Jesus’ righteousness, not sinners (Phil. 3:9). We are not ex-convicts who can’t get hired. God gives us jobs to do for His kingdom even when we still make mistakes. We can’t get free in our own strength, but we are new creations in Christ Jesus. The Holy Spirit comes to live inside us and changes us to be like Jesus, who we were created to be like in the first place. This is escape from bondage (Isaiah 61:1). Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom (2 Cor.3:17).

If those men on Alcatraz had accepted Jesus, they could have been set free from their criminal behavior and received inner healing and so much more. On Alcatraz, the inmates had to earn the privilege of reading books, playing music, spending time in the recreation yard. But with Jesus, salvation and many other blessings are given to believers out of God’s grace or unmerited favor. We can’t earn it.